Amazon Game Studios Lays Off Dozens of Workers During E3

E3 was last week, and I think we all more-or-less had a good time as the video game industry put on its finest clothes and paraded around in front of us so we could shower it with our pennies and saliva. But while the best of the best were there strutting their stuff, there were other developers who weren’t present, working like normal… and perhaps hoping that the shadow of E3 would give them safe haven from the scrutiny of the news.

If that was what Amazon was hoping to pull when they quietly laid off ‘dozens’ of their game dev employees last week, it didn’t work.

Here’s the skinny: an unspecified number of game devs who came aboard Amazon Game Studios were laid off, given 60 days to either find jobs within Amazon or receive a severance package and shown the door. In the process of delivering the news, it was also revealed that several unannounced games would be canceled as well: but not the two games we know of, Crucible and New World.

Amazon responded to Kotaku when reached out for comment.

“Amazon Game Studios is reorganizing some of our teams to allow us to prioritize development of New World, Crucible, and new unannounced projects we’re excited to reveal in the future. These moves are the result of regular business planning cycles where we align resources to match evolving, long-range priorities. We’re working closely with all employees affected by these changes to assist them in finding new roles within Amazon. Amazon is deeply committed to games and continues to invest heavily in Amazon Game Studios, Twitch, Twitch Prime, AWS, our retail businesses, and other areas within Amazon.”

It's not terribly surprising these layoffs are happening: since its foundation in 2014, the studio hasn’t managed to push out even a single game, and has lost a lot of the early talent that made it exciting. Maybe Ol’ Bezos is starting to doubt the initiative?

Who knows. I doubt Amazon will be too forthcoming with more details.